During this year, we chemists will be doing our best to bring chemistry to the attention of everyone.
Information on the international events planned for this year can be found at www.chemistry2011.org, while local happenings are detailed at yearofchemistry.org.nz.
But why was 2011 chosen as the year to celebrate all things chemical? Well, for one thing, the physicists had their year in 2005 and we chemists couldn't possibly be upstaged.
But much more likely is the fact that 2011 marks the centenary of the award of the Nobel Prize in chemistry to one of the most well-known people (and one of only four women) to have received the award - Maria Salome Sklodowska.
Maria Sklodowska was born in Warsaw in 1867, and while she is usually stated to be Polish by birth, Poland didn't exist as a sovereign country at that time, having been partitioned between Russia, Prussia and Austria-Hungary.
After her schooling, in 1891, she moved to Paris to study at the Sorbonne, where she obtained degrees in physics in 1893 and mathematics in 1894, the same year she met her husband-to-be, Pierre Curie.
Marie Curie (Marie is the French form of Maria) had the good fortune to come of scientific age about the turn of the 20th century, a time of such revolutionary advances in science that humankind was forced to re-evaluate the way it saw the universe.
Particularly pertinent to her work was the discovery of radioactivity in 1896 by Henri Becquerel; he found that compounds containing uranium caused darkening of a photographic plate when placed next to it in the dark, and concluded that the uranium was emitting "rays" of a similar nature to the recently discovered X-rays.
Marie Curie investigated this new phenomenon in detail as part of her doctoral thesis.
Her studies showed that the uranium ores pitchblende and chalcolite were more radioactive than uranium itself, and this led her to conclude that these ores must contain a hitherto unknown and highly radioactive element.
And thus began the work for which she became famous.
Marie and husband Pierre set about identifying and isolating this new element, but, to their surprise, they found two.
Using small-scale chemical and physical techniques, they identified tiny amounts of both polonium (named for Marie's home country) and radium (named after the Latin for ray) in a small sample of pitchblende.
They then embarked on the isolation of a measurable amount of radium.
In order to do this, they started with more than a tonne of pitchblende and, after an inordinate amount of work, obtained 0.1g of the compound radium chloride.
As a result, the two Curies, along with Becquerel, were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1903, the citation reading "in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel".
Pierre died in 1906, after being run over by a horse-drawn wagon, and Marie took over his academic post at the Sorbonne, becoming the first female professor at that institution.
She continued her work on radioactivity (a word she coined) and won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1911 "in recognition of her services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element".
Sadly, at the start of her career, Marie did not know of the dangerous effects of radioactivity, and her death in 1934 was almost certainly hastened by lifelong exposure to radiation.
Indeed, her papers (and her cookbook!) from the 1890s are still so radioactive they are considered too dangerous to handle without protective clothing and are kept in a lead box.
Her daughter, Irene, was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry the year after Marie's death, making this the only mother/daughter pair to be so awarded.
And so, this year, we celebrate not only the achievements of this remarkable woman, but chemistry as a whole.
I wish you all a very happy 2011, and hope your curiosities lead you to find out more about this fascinating subject.
• Dr Blackman is an associate professor in the chemistry department at the University of Otago.
